Caught in…naval gunfire, the wounded and dead…increase[d]…most feared…was the naval shelling, which…reach[ed] the obscure mountain caves where…CPs were located…The feeling of everyone is ‘if they would only stop the naval shelling.’Unknown Japanese prisoner of war

At 05:00 there was a fierce enemy air attack. I have at last come to the place where I will die. I am pleased to think that I will die calmly in true samurai style. Naval gunfire…was too terrible for words…Toward evening the firing died down, but at night naval gunfire continued as before.Diary of an unknown Japanese soldier

For three days before any Marines came ashore on this invasion beach, battleships, heavy cruisers, and destroyers-part of a 500warship fleet-pounded targets near the beaches and inland with their heavy guns. More than 200 American warplanes strafed and bombed Saipan before the June 1944 landings.